Since the start of the 1990s, political and legal reforms in “multicultural” or “pluricultural” Latin American states have favored the recognition of legal pluralism and, increasingly, of special jurisdictions for indigenous law. Political debate, legislative proposals and everyday practice has focused on how to “coordinate” official and indigenous justice systems in a way that guarantees fundamental human rights and indigenous peoples’ rights to jurisdictional autonomy. This essay presents a critical review of tendencies towards interlegal “coordination” in Latin America, followed by an ethnographic analysis of the political, social and cultural negotiations involved in a specific experience of interlegal, interethnic coordination which occurred in Santa Cruz del Quiché, Guatemala, in 2006. Instead of concepts of separate or closed forms of law and identity which underpin contemporary paradigms of coordination, it is proposed here that intercultural negotiations about the nature of law, and through law, produce forms of justice that challenge existing ethnic frontiers. These “legal hybrids” (Santos 2006) are a consequence of the demands of organized indigenous peoples in favour of their rights and of their efforts to strengthen their own forms of government and justice. However, they are also a product of the competition between different imaginaries of justice and the search for security in a highly violent society marked by the neoliberal global capitalism of the twenty first century.

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(2011) “Promesas y peligros de la “coordinación”: Derecho indígena, inseguridad y la búsqueda de justicia en Guatemala,” Revista Argentina de Teoría Jurídica, Volumen 12: 1-46.